On the whole García Márquez’s view of the Soviet Union was sympathetic and favourable, reminiscent now, all these years later, of the way he would respond to Cuba and its difficulties in the 1970s. But he made no attempt to hide the negatives he had been able to detect. On the return journey he and Plinio Mendoza, still with Pablo Solano, visited Stalingrad (now Volgograd), and sailed down the Volga to the entrance of the great Volga-Don ship canal, where there was a gigantic statue of Stalin presiding complacently over one of the country’s great achievements. García Márquez left Plinio Mendoza in Kiev and travelled on to Hungary. Mendoza, who was later stranded for over a week in Brest-Litovsk because Solano came down with pneumonia, travelled back through Poland. He was utterly disillusioned by everything he had seen—“we lost our innocence,” he would say later—and gradually came to believe that communist regimes were all cursed by the same regressive genetic code (though he would try once more to believe—in Cuba—in 1959); but García Márquez, who had no bourgeois past to mourn, and no bourgeois tastes to cultivate, was still eager for more experience. He had managed to get himself included in a group of eighteen foreign writers and observers, including two reporters—himself and Belgian Maurice Mayer—invited on to Budapest.
This was less than a year after the Soviet invasion of October 1956. János Kádár had replaced Imre Nagy as leader when the Soviet forces quelled the Hungarian uprising in November 1956. At this time, the summer of 1957, Hungary had been closed for ten months and, according to García Márquez, his was the first delegation of foreigners allowed back into the country. The visit was for two weeks and the authorities arranged an itinerary giving no time for free access to the city or the Hungarian people: “they did all they could to stop us forming any concrete impression of the situation.”29 On the fifth day García Márquez escaped his escort after lunch and set out into the city alone. He had been sceptical about Western reports relating to the suppression of the 1956 uprising but the state of the city buildings and the information he was given by Hungarians he met convinced him that the number of Hungarian casualties—estimated at 5,000 dead and 20,000 wounded—might have been even higher than he had read in the Western press. On succeeding evenings he talked to ordinary Hungarians, including several prostitutes, housewives and students, whose alienation and cynicism shocked him. His audacious behaviour and that of his companion Maurice Mayer produced an unexpected outcome: the authorities decided that the foreigners had to be taken more seriously and thus they were introduced to Kádár himself and taken off on one of his speaking tours, to Ujpest, eighty miles from Budapest. The strategy worked—not the last time that García Márquez would be intoxicated by direct access to the powerful. He stated that Kádár was obviously just the kind of ordinary working man who “goes to the zoo on a Sunday to throw peanuts to the elephants”; he was a modest individual who had found himself in power, clearly had no monstrous appetites and had to choose between supporting the nationalist ultra-right or giving his backing to the Soviet occupation of the country in order to save it for the communism he fervently believed in.30
García Márquez was clearly pleased to be given arguments that made him feel better about the depressing picture he had seen in the streets of Hungary. He analysed the contradictions of the communist regime and the way the workers were denied the fruits of their labour in order to build the communist state, and said, tellingly, that looting could have been avoided the previous year: “It was a question of pent-up appetites that a healthy communist party could have channelled in other directions.”31 Now, he concluded, Kádár needed to be helped out of the hole he was in but the West was only interested in making things worse. And things were indeed getting worse: the government was being forced to bring in a system of surveillance whose overall effect was “simply monstrous”:
Kádár doesn’t know what to do. From the moment he made his precipitate call for Soviet troops, irremediably committed with a hot potato in his hands, he had to renounce his convictions in order to move forward. But circumstances are pushing him backwards. He got caught up in the campaign against Nagy whom he accused of having sold out to the West because it’s the only way he can justify his own coup d’état. Since he can’t raise the salaries, since there are no consumer goods, since the economy is destroyed, since his collaborators are untried or incompetent, since the people will not forgive him for calling in the Russians, since he can’t perform miracles, but since he can’t let go of the potato either and slip out by a side entrance, he has to put people in prison and maintain against his own principles a regime of terror which is worse than the one before, which he himself had fought.32
Despite the effort to make excuses for Kádár, García Márquez was deeply shocked and discouraged. In early September, on his return to Paris from Budapest, he phoned Plinio Mendoza just before Mendoza returned to Caracas. Despite his ongoing efforts to write positive reports on his experiences in Hungary, he exclaimed: “Everything we’ve seen up to now is nothing compared to Hungary.”33 Of course the journey remained, for the time being, a secret. As late as mid-December he would inform his mother back in Cartagena that “a Venezuelan magazine funded a long journey” but he did not say where the journey had taken him.34
García Márquez had returned to Paris from his long journey with no money and nowhere to stay. “After fifty-one hours on the train all I had in my pockets was a telephone token. As I didn’t want to lose it and it was too early, I waited until nine in the morning to call a friend. ‘Wait there,’ he said, and took me to a chambre de bonne he was renting in Neuilly and lent it to me. There I sat down again to write In Evil Hour.”35 First, though, in late September and October 1957, in that maid’s room in Paris, García Márquez wrote up his impressions of the recent journey, seamlessly weaving in the experience of Poland and Czechoslovakia back in 1955. The result was a long series of articles which would eventually appear as “90 Days Behind the Iron Curtain (De viaje por los países socialistas)” in 1959, though he published his experiences of the USSR and Hungary immediately in Momento (Caracas) through Plinio Mendoza.36 They make up a remarkable testimony of a moment in history and a strikingly judicious and prescient critique, by a well-disposed observer, of the weaknesses of the Soviet system.37 He sent them back to his mentor Eduardo Zalamea Borda, “Ulysses,” for publication in El Independiente, where he was now assistant editor. Who knows with what emotions the old leftist editor picked them up and salted them away in his filing cabinet, where García Márquez would find them two years later and finally manage to get them published in the weekly magazine Cromos.38
Meanwhile, Tachia had spent nine months in Spain: “After the affair with Gabriel I spent three years totally disoriented: scarred, embittered, all my relationships had gone wrong, I had no man.” She had gone straight to Madrid in December, before Christmas, and was hired immediately. She worked for the theatre group of Maritza Caballero, a rich Venezuelan, starting, ironically enough, with Antigone, the play so closely connected to García Márquez’s first novel, Leaf Storm: she played Ismene, Antigone’s sister.
Then she went back to Paris: “My boss Maritza Caballero drove me all the way in her Mercedes, which was a glamorous experience.” One day she saw him—“sooner than I wanted to”—in the window of what is now the Café Luxembourg on Boulevard Saint-Michel. She went in, they talked and decided they should “finish things properly.” They went to a cheap hotel nearby and spent the night together. “It was difficult, anguished, but better. That was not long before he left Paris. After that final parting in 1957 Gabriel and I didn’t meet again till 1968.”39
García Márquez’s time in Paris was almost at an end. De Gaulle had returned to power in June, supposedly to save the Fourth Republic from losing Algeria. Instead he had announced the inauguration of the Fifth Republic and would eventually save the French from themselves by giving Algeria away.
In early November, a couple of weeks after the announcement that Albert Camus had won the Nobel Prize for Literat
ure, García Márquez moved to London,40 where he intended to hold out as long as possible, as he had in Paris, on the basis of articles hopefully published in El Independiente and the Venezuelan magazine Momento, of which Plinio Mendoza was now the editor. Mendoza would only publish two of these articles, “I Visited Hungary” (“Yo visité Hungría”) and “I Was in Russia” (“Yo estuve en Rusia”), in late November. García Márquez had always wanted to study English and the journey through Eastern Europe had emphasized more starkly its growing importance because no one there spoke Spanish. As it happened he had been showing an interest in British affairs—the monarchy and the politicians (Eden, Bevan, Macmillan)—ever since his arrival in Europe, even if his professed interest was only in Britain’s stereotypical decadence. Although Franco’s Spain was off ideological limits (and perhaps he even feared he might be picked up there, given the close links between Spain and Colombia, and the possibility that he was on the Rojas Pinilla government’s anti-communist blacklist), he had spent the best part of a year with a Spanish woman; and clearly a visit to Europe’s other old colonial country was a logical part of his grand design. Indeed, it is striking how much of Europe East and West he managed to see, given the difficulty of the times and his dire financial straits. But the attempt to live in London on the flimsiest of shoestrings without knowing the language and without the Latin American contacts always available in Paris was certainly a valiant endeavour.
He lasted almost six weeks in a small hotel room in South Kensington, writing not In Evil Hour but yet more stories that had peeled off from it and would later become much loved by readers when they appeared as part of the collection Big Mama’s Funeral and Other Stories. Like his novella about the colonel and his pension, and unlike In Evil Hour, these would be stories not about the cold-hearted authorities who run the small towns in which they take place but about the poor people doing what they can in the face of adversity, as he liked to think that he had done during his dark year in Paris, stories with a human face and positive values. Zavattini-type stories. Despite his best intentions, he gave himself very little opportunity to learn the local language, though on Saturdays and Sundays he would listen to the orators at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. His article “A Saturday in London,” in which he sums up, almost folklorically, his experiences in the British capital, may be “the best piece of journalism he wrote in Europe.”41 It was composed while he was still in London and published both by El Nacional of Caracas and by Momento in January 1958. In it he remarks:
When I arrived in London I thought the English talked to themselves in the street. Later I realized they were saying sorry. On Saturdays, when the whole city piles into Piccadilly Circus, it is impossible to move without bumping into someone. Then there is a vast buzzing, a uniform street chorus: “Sorry.” Because of the fog the only thing I knew about the English was the sound of their voices. I would hear them excusing themselves in the midday penumbra, navigating on their instruments like the planes do through the dark cotton wool of the fog. Finally this last Saturday—in the light of the sun—I saw them for the first time. They were all eating as they walked the streets.42
His main complaint, however, he would later tell Mario Vargas Llosa, by then living in London himself, was the absence of black tobacco; he spent much of his money buying imported Gauloises. Yet he would also say that London had held a strange attraction for him: “You are lucky to be in a city which, for mysterious reasons, is the best to write in, apart from being, for my taste, the best in the world. I went there on a tourist basis, and something obliged me to shut myself away in a room where one could literally levitate in the tobacco smoke and in one month I wrote nearly all the stories of Big Mama. I wasted the visit but I gained a book.”43
On 3 December he sent a letter to his mother in Cartagena via Mercedes in Barranquilla. In it he mentioned writing to Aunt Dilia in Bogotá, presumably to send his condolences for the recent death of her husband Juan de Dios, Luisa Santiaga’s only sibling. At that time García Márquez’s plans were still fluid, though he said he thought he would soon be home: “I’ve been in London a fortnight and preparing myself for the return to Colombia. In the next few weeks I’m thinking of making a quick trip back to Paris and then to Barcelona and Madrid—since Spain is the only European country I don’t know—so I calculate I’ll be in Colombia for Christmas or New Year at the latest. I’m still not tired of travelling round the world but Mercedes has been waiting for too long. It’s not fair to make her wait any longer, although—if I’m not mistaken—she may have just a bit of patience left. But it wouldn’t be right, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in Europe it’s that not all women are as solid and serious as she is.”44 He said he had no money and no job, though El Espectador had made promising noises. He asked his mother to get two copies of his birth certificate, commenting, “Believe it or not, I haven’t got married in Europe.”
Less than two weeks later, on 16 December, he received an unexpected telegram from Caracas. Plinio Mendoza’s boss was offering him a plane ticket to the Venezuelan capital to work on Momenta with him and Mendoza. It was an offer too good to refuse, given the obvious lack of options in London, a city where, as he later told me, “it was impossible for a foreigner to live without a minimum of money.”45 Still, he phoned Mendoza to say that a madman had called from Caracas complaining about his—the madman’s—misfortunes and offering him a job. Mendoza confirmed that Carlos Ramírez MacGregor was indeed crazy but the job was real. García Márquez flew out of London just before Christmas, not to Colombia, as he had only recently promised, but to Venezuela.
Forty years later, he said to me: “You know, when I lost the job in Europe early in 1956, I let everything go again, just like in Barranquilla. I could easily have picked something up, with some other paper, but I just drifted, for two years. Until of course I stopped and got back to my things. But for most of that time I just attended to my emotions, my inner world, I had experiences and I built a personal world. Most Latin Americans get culture when they’re in Europe but I didn’t do any of that.”46
12
Venezuela and Colombia:
The Birth of Big Mama
1958–1959
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ FLEW in to Venezuela’s Maiquetía Airport on 23 December 1957, a week after receiving the telegram from Caracas. He was full of excitement and anticipation. He had travelled via Lisbon, where it was snowing, then flew far away from Europe and landed in Paramaribo, Surinam, where it was asphyxiatingly hot and reeking of guavas, the smell of his childhood.1 He was wearing blue jeans and a brown nylon shirt he had bought in a sale on Boulevard Saint-Michel, which he washed every night, and he was carrying the rest of his possessions in a single cardboard suitcase mainly filled by the manuscripts of No One Writes to the Colonel, the new stories he had started in London, and the still unnamed In Evil Hour. Mendoza remembers picking his friend up at about five in the afternoon, with his sister Soledad for company, giving him a brief tour of central Caracas and then taking him to the smart suburb of San Bernardino and lodging him in a pensión whose owners were Italian immigrants.
It was his first visit to a Latin American country other than Colombia. Caracas was a conurbation of perhaps a million and a half people. On the ride into town in Mendoza’s white open-topped MG sports car, García Márquez asked him and Soledad where the city was. Caracas was by then a sprawling, disorganized, motor-dominated urban ribbon, shining white against the green foothills and mauve summit of Mount Avila. It was like a North American city in the tropics. Venezuela, not for the first time, was in the grip of a ruthless military dictatorship. Indeed, the native land of the great Liberator Simón Bolívar had almost no tradition or experience of parliamentary democracy. The portly General Marcos Pérez Jiménez had been absolute ruler for six long years but he had presided over an industrial boom based on the petroleum industry which had unleashed a frenzy of building and highway construction such as no other Latin American country had yet experienced.2
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The owner of Momento, Carlos Ramírez MacGregor, dubbed “the madman” (“el loco”) by his employees, was thin, bald and, so Mendoza said, given to fits of hysteria; he wore crumpled white tropical suits and spent most of his life behind the dark glasses which were then at the height of their popularity in a Latin America dominated by military dictatorships. He did not even return García Márquez’s greeting the first morning. Perhaps, like Guillermo Cano before him at El Espectador, he could not reconcile the garish, skeletal figure before him with the picture Mendoza had painted of an outstanding writer and journalist who had enhanced his already substantial reputation during two and a half years in Europe.
García Márquez was undaunted. He would later describe his time in Caracas as a period when he was “happy and undocumented” (the eventual title of the anthology of the articles he wrote there), though he did not feel immediately at home. After Europe’s grey restraint he found Venezuelans somewhat overbearing. But for all the excesses in terms of decibels and glad-handing, the atmosphere in Caracas was reminiscent of the life of tropical gaiety and informality that he had loved in Barranquilla, with one extraordinary advantage: Caracas was actually the capital city of this unfamiliar Caribbean country.
García Márquez and Mendoza, excited to be together again, celebrated both Christmas and New Year in the house of another of Plinio’s sisters, Elvira. Gabo, who had spent much of the last year quite alone, and his brief time in London completely isolated, was delighted to have an audience—if occasionally a reluctant one—for his endless ideas for stories, a stream which had increased dramatically ever since he encountered Cinecittà and the movie scripts of Zavattini. Mendoza had not previously lived in close proximity to a García Márquez with a fixed abode and a steady job and was soon astonished to discover that a friend who worked with such intensity in the newspaper office nevertheless managed to sustain another, completely separate life: “Everywhere I witnessed his secret work as a novelist, the way he always contrived to get on with his books. And I even shared in that strange schizophrenia of the novelist who manages, day by day, to live with his characters, as if they were creatures with a life of their own. Before writing each chapter, he would narrate it to me.”3
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